Contemporary networks such as in enterprises or in cloud computing platforms are challenged by chatty applications (tenants) and/or bandwidth-intensive applications (e.g., multimedia and file sharing applications, background replication, social media applications, email, and N to M traffic patterns in map-reduce jobs where multiple senders send data simultaneously to different receivers). For example, the hosted tenants can consume a significant part of network resources and bandwidth.
Moreover, hosted third-party applications in a network can inadvertently interfere with each other or maliciously attack other applications. For example, in an environment with multiple virtual machines, an application may launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack by sending significant amounts of traffic to other virtual machines, such as those hosting applications of competitors. Whether because of a bug or a targeted attack, this can degrade the performance of the shared network resulting in ‘collateral damage’ in performance, availability, or security to other hosted tenants, bring down the other virtual machines, or both.